I have little doubt that Claire Denis is one of our greatest living filmmakers, but communicating this to the uninitiated when many of her films aren’t readily available — i.e. through completely legal means, unless you, like I, still get discs from Netflix — can be something of an uphill battle. But considering the thrill that recent news seems to have brought cinephiles around the world, now’s a good time to highlight one of her greatest works — and one of the finest films of the ’90s — which you can watch right now, for free, and in only about 66 minutes’ time.
It’s U.S. Go Home, a 1994 feature produced for the French television series Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge (All the Boys and Girls of Their Age, approximately). Though essentially unknown two decades after the fact, it managed to snag some of the country’s leading cinematic voices — Olivier Assayas (whose entry would become the much-lauded Cold Water), Chantal Akerman, and André Téchiné among them — and tasked them with producing films “about teenagers set in their own adolescent era, though not necessarily culled from autobiography, with one major narrative stipulation: there must be a party scene.”
Denis took these guidelines very seriously. Not for nothing that U.S. Go Home is (as far as I can surmise) the most autobiographical item she’s ever produced, more than a third of its running time is spent at a single rock-saturated party that includes The Animals, The Yardbirds, Otis Redding, Nico, Chuck Berry, and The Troggs; all are used exceptionally well, especially in a gut-punching cut to credits. The structure is entirely dominated by this single event: sequences preceding it are about the social and personal struggles that go into getting there, and those following it almost exclusively concern the immediate ripples it creates between two siblings (Alice Houri and Grégoire Colin, who would again play a sister-brother pairing in the director’s 1996 feature Nénette et Boni).
Few movies contain so much sound, force, and wisdom in such a short period of time. This, alone, would make U.S. Go Home a stunner, but Denis’ combined skill for photographing bodies and plumbing her characters’ psychological depths help elevate it to masterpiece status. That it can be seen so readily is a significant testament to what good film culture might do in this day and age.
Watch the entire thing below (hit the CC button for English subtitles):